"There's a rumor making the rounds that poetry, alas, is dead--I know of
no better way to refute that idiocy than to immerse yourself in these
lyric stanzas, these deftly-crafted narrative moments that unreel like
snippets of cinema. June Saraceno has once again infused the literary
landscape with a necessary breath; this long-awaited volume couldn't come
at a better time." -Patricia Smith

"June Saraceno's Of Dirt and Tar explores and illuminates
interior and exterior worlds, as well as the temporal landscape of
generations, as Alice might walk from one world into another; Saraceno
guides us on the journey, poem by poem, with a deft touch, her pen equally
comfortable in free verse as it is in the sonnet or villanelle. I promise
you: this book is just as good at 30,000 feet over the Atlantic seaboard
as it is in a rocking chair on the back porch of a moonlit home in the
woods."-Brian Turner

"Saraceno writes, 'A blue and white porcelain shoe /conjures my
grandmother,' and her poems, filled with images both natural and
human-made, both in splendor as well as in decomposition, seethe with the
heat of the liminal, the warm breath of the lost, as well as the slant
shine of what has been remade. Elegiac at times, they also ring with
hopefulness, as if the speaker has thrown herself onto 'the back of
something that breaks from the dark / into a gallop, / and head[s] out
heedless on the path to daylight.' These poems are both artifact and art
in their quiet, soulful courageousness."-Laura McCullough

June Sylvester Saraceno is author of Altars of Ordinary Light (Plain
View Press 2007) and the chapbook Mean Girl Trips (Pudding
House Publications 2006). She earned an MFA in Creative Writing from
Bowling Green State University and is currently English Program Chair at
Sierra Nevada College, Lake Tahoe where she teaches in the BFA and MFA
programs. She is founding editor of the Sierra Nevada Review. A
recipient of a writing residency at Camac in Marnay-sur-Seine, France and
grant awardee from Sierra Arts Foundation, Saraceno lives and writes in
Truckee, California. For more information visit www.junesaraceno.com.